Lentil Underground

by Liz Carlisle

  This family of fertility-boosting plants—legumes—included several types of beans, forages, and dried peas. Midwestern farmers were already using one of them, soybeans, in rotation with corn. In fact, Dave realized, he had one of these plants growing on his own place. Alfalfa, which he had been raising for cattle feed, was a legume. That was why it had been such a good complement to barley—it reloaded the soil with nitrogen. And a couple of years earlier, Dave recalled, he had hosted another legume on his “oddball acres”: fava beans. He’d used those for feed too, since they were high in protein. Instead of thinking of these plants as a nutrient source for his cattle, Dave started to see green manures as a means of fertilizing his soil directly, without using livestock as middlemen. He didn’t need to go to a USDA-inspected plant to package his beans, so presumably, there would be no problem declaring them organic.

  Dave’s newly leguminous lens on the world extended beyond the farm. He found himself trolling roadside ditches, looking for drought-hardy plants that could feed his soil. If Dave couldn’t identify a legume based on its resemblance to something familiar like alfalfa or fava beans, he dug it up. The telltale sign of nitrogen-fixing plants, as Miguel Altieri had demonstrated, was underground. This was where the legumes’ symbiotic bacteria lived: in bulbous white nodules at the tips of their roots. Sure enough, Dave discovered with no small satisfaction, there were plants growing their own nitrogen here in central Montana, without any irrigation or encouragement from MSU. The “borrow pits” at the edge of the road (so named because the highway department had “borrowed” the soil when digging the roadside ditches) were full of them: milk vetch, purple vetch, yellow blossom sweet clover. They were everywhere. In fact, some of these legumes were already being intentionally planted—the sweet clover was a regular component of pasture mixes.

  But Dave wasn’t the only one scouting for nodules in the borrow pits. There was another legume renegade on the prowl. A college man. And he thought he’d found the answer.

  3

  MIRACLE PLANT

  “Imagine a plant that could eliminate the use of commercial nitrogen fertilizer on millions of cultivated acres,” hinted the fall 1984 issue of the Sun Times, the Alternative Energy Resources Organization’s newsletter. “Imagine a plant that would reduce wind and water erosion on otherwise bare land, and that would help control saline seep. Imagine a plant that would increase soil organic matter, grow like a weed, reseed itself year after year, and dovetail perfectly with the crop-fallow system of farming so evident across the northern Great Plains. In short, imagine a plant that could open the door to a more sustainable agriculture for thousands of farms in the United States and Canada. Sound too good to be true? A futuristic ‘miracle plant’ of genetic engineering? Hardly. In fact, you probably can find it in your back yard.”

  “If you can’t find it in your own yard, ask your county extension agent,” Sun Times columnist Dave Oien added cheekily. “He or she will lead you to the Courthouse lawn, where the plant no doubt grows with a vengeance. Just don’t mention you’re looking for seed. With the possible exception of dandelions, this plant is probably the biggest lawn weed problem in the state.”

  Dave’s miracle plant—black medic—was the semisecret variety trial darling of a rogue agronomist at Montana State University, Jim Sims. While the Ag Task Force was still struggling to make headway with Sims’s colleagues, Dave had run into Sims at an experiment station field day. A PhD talking about legumes? Dave marveled. He started pumping his new acquaintance for more details about his research.

  Black medic was a relative of alfalfa that was already growing wild in Montana, Jim explained, pulling a handful of textured black seedpods out of his pocket to show Dave. Most farmers had never heard of “medics,” Jim continued, because this hardy class of plants was used primarily by Australian ranchers: as a forage crop for livestock. In dry southern Australia, an environment not unlike Montana, ranchers had found that leguminous medics increased the number of livestock they could support on a given pasture. And then they’d had an idea. Since medics seemed to have such a salutary effect, why not follow a few years of medic pasture with a grain crop? Impressed by the Australians’ idea, Jim had begun experimenting with some of their medics in his test plots at MSU, to see how much they could increase the fertility of the soil. But to Jim’s surprise, all the medics he planted on the research farm were beat out by one he happened to see growing along its edges: black medic. This plant, Jim reported, could fix forty to fifty pounds of nitrogen in a growing season, boosting the following year’s wheat yields by a whopping 92 percent. And contrary to naysayers’ customary objection to green manures, it wasn’t a water hog. The hardy legume’s shallow roots drew moisture from only the top two feet of the soil surface. Ninety percent of its water needs could be replenished by winter precipitation, so the soil would be ready for grain the next year.

  Black medic, it seemed, was the perfect Montana-adapted fertilizer crop. But unfortunately, although farmers hadn’t heard of it, their wives recognized it instantly: as the taprooty weed they were forever battling in their yards. Hands on their hips, the female witnesses to Jim Sims’s field day performance told him his miracle plant was just plain old trefoil or “black clover.” They had enough weed problems as it was, the incredulous farm women protested. They didn’t need to go planting them intentionally. What was a university man doing, spending taxpayer dollars on such a crackpot scheme?

  LEGUME COWBOY

  From the second he opened his mouth, it was clear that Dr. James Sims wasn’t the typical Montana State University researcher. Raised on a ranch in New Mexico, Jim drew more on the school of hard knocks than on his PhD—and more on field trials than on the tiny plots at the MSU experiment station.

  Jim had become intimately familiar with the vicissitudes of Montana, having crisscrossed the state multiple times since moving to Bozeman in 1966. While he was still a graduate student at UC Riverside, the budding soil chemist had been recruited by Montana State to teach the farmers of the northern plains how to apply industrial fertilizers, which was still a relatively new practice. The young professor had been dispatched to the far corners of Big Sky Country to spread the good news of better living through chemistry.

  Jim enjoyed the work, but he was convinced there had to be a better way than synthetic nutrients. As a graduate student, he had traveled to Egypt, where his PhD adviser, Dr. Frank T. Bingham, was collaborating with local researchers who worked with legumes. Interested in learning more about nitrogen-fixing plants, Jim had stayed in touch with Bingham, who had managed to find him a grant to attend the World Congress of Soil Science in Adelaide, Australia, in 1968. “That trip,” Jim recalled, “converted me to biological systems.”

  Instead of playing the part of the studious assistant professor, Jim had donned his cowboy hat and talked rancher with the dignitaries in attendance. Most of the legislators and researchers at the congress had their own “stations” (the Aussie term for a diversified livestock and crop operation), and the charming American had managed to score himself a handful of invitations. What he’d witnessed had completely shifted his thinking about how to boost soil fertility back in Montana.

  The Australians were using a more efficient strategy than the chemical approach, Jim discovered. After twenty years of experimenting with medics and clovers, the Aussies had developed a system called “ley” (temporary pasture) farming. Under this form of management, legumes were used as both fertilizer and livestock forage, so the soil was continuously regenerated by the agricultural system itself. Sims was astounded by the diverse array of plants the Australians used as soil builders. He returned to Bozeman determined to adapt such an approach to the northern Great Plains.

  “I looked about for something I could use for the legume phase that would reseed itself in this environment,” Jim recounted, recalling his hunch that most of the Australian legumes probably wouldn’t grow as well half a world away. “I was walking about the research farm and there was
a bunch of black medic, so I said, well, I could try that. I gathered seed with my hands to get enough to put in the first experiment.”

  Of course, it wasn’t as easy as that. Jim’s funding still came from the chemical companies, and his dean and department chair at MSU continued to tell him (as they were telling the Ag Task Force) that the only things that would grow in Montana were wheat and barley. Plus, there was no market for anything else, the authorities insisted. This last argument was a rather circular one, Jim realized—the church of wheat and barley’s self-fulfilling prophecy. When he questioned the agricultural marketing experts over in the economics department, they actually told him with a straight face that their models showed low demand for Montana legumes—as if this “low demand” was simply the result of some immutable economic law. And yet, how could anyone demand a product that not only didn’t exist, but also had been declared impossible? The hand manipulating the supply side of this equation was anything but invisible.

  Once he figured out that MSU’s economists didn’t have much to offer him, Jim started doing his own research, and he discovered that Montana had supported a profitable pea industry in the 1930s. The pea business had been so lucrative, in fact, that the crop had succumbed to blight because it wasn’t being rotated with anything else. When Montana’s peas crashed in the late 1940s, the Gallatin Valley Seed Company had moved its operations to Twin Falls, Idaho, inaugurating a sixty-year pea monopoly that Idaho and Washington had swiftly locked in with protective legislation. Jim wasn’t fixing to get Montana back into the pea business, but he figured if legumes had grown here before, they could grow here again. Neither the opinions of his colleagues nor the wishes of his funders were going to stop him.

  Instead of battling his superiors, Jim went straight to Montana’s farmers. It didn’t take him long to identify David Oien as a fellow traveler. After meeting Dave at the extension workshop, Jim convinced his new friend to plant a couple of his “oddball acres” with self-seeding legumes. Dave chose a patch of earth right outside his front window, and his first black medic crop went in the ground in the spring of 1983.

  Dave started with twenty pounds of medic seed, enough to plant two acres. He fed the tiny “weed” seeds into a twelve-foot disk drill and let ’er rip. Once again, Dave talked Orville into helping, explaining that this experiment was basically like seeding alfalfa (aka Medicago sativa) or sweet clover. Medic was a cousin to those plants, Dave told his dad. It looked similar, they could use the same seeder for it, and besides, a college man from Bozeman was promoting it with research. This wasn’t just another wild hare dreamed up by Dave’s hippie friends in Missoula. Let’s see how it grows, Orville said dispassionately from the seat of the tractor, while Dave rode the drill. But Dave couldn’t help but be optimistic. It was a perfect mid-May afternoon, and he and his dad were literally planting the seeds of the future together.

  What excited Dave most about medic was that it was not just an annual green manure, but the keystone of a long-term cropping system. Dave and his dad would sow the medic this year and let it go to seed. The plant’s black seedpods had such thick walls that only about half of the tiny amber seeds would escape in time to germinate this season. The other half would remain in the soil and germinate the next year, along with whatever grain crop the Oiens planted. Dave and Orville’s grain would easily canopy out over the low-growing medic, which would obligingly supply nitrogen throughout the season without hogging either sunlight or soil moisture. This farming method—undersowing—was a completely different ball game for cash-grain agriculture. It meant that farmers didn’t have to choose between fertilizer crops and grain crops. They could grow them at the same time.

  Dave got even more excited when his medic started poking up out of the ground. He had a great stand with good soil cover. It wasn’t long, however, before weeds started to creep in, encroaching on the noncompetitive legume. Dave sprung into action, protecting his plants with the tenacity of a first-time parent. Every three weeks he went out to the fields by himself. He spent long evenings working up and down his two acres, pulling weeds before they had a chance to spread.

  Dave’s first year as a black medic farmer yielded 150 pounds of seed. He wanted to expand his experiment, so he harvested the entire crop and convinced his dad to plant it on ten acres instead of just two. The Oiens finished season two with more than 650 pounds of the prolific legume. At this point, Dave was running out of oddball acres, and he didn’t want to keep this miracle plant to himself anyway. He needed to get some friends in on the deal. In the fall of 1985, Dave managed to convince three AERO buddies to purchase starter seed from him at 6 dollars a pound: Tom Hastings, Jim Barngrover, and Bud Barta.

  A CARPENTER WITH A CONSCIENCE

  Bud Barta was the perfect foil for his unconventional crop. The gentle, bearded father of three was muscular, not macho—the kind of guy you’d hope to have with you if your truck broke down. He credited his father with teaching him the critical skills of life (“farming, mechanics, and common sense”), to which he appeared to have added few bells and whistles beyond a bachelors of science in electrical engineering. Although Bud had always earned respectable grades, he’d been in no particular hurry to go to college, since he’d enjoyed his post–high school jobs as a carpenter and general contractor. Nor was he particularly eager to hang around academia after graduation. Neither graduate school nor a high-paying job with an engineering firm appealed to Bud, who had been just as happy trimming trees to pay for school as he had been with school itself. Truthfully, all Bud really wanted was to earn an honest living that still left plenty of time for fishing and skiing. So he’d moved back to the 1,200-acre ranch and grain farm where he’d grown up, two and a half hours southeast of Conrad, in Lewistown, Montana.

  Bud’s quiet workingman’s manner matched the character of his hometown. Dubbed Charlie Russell country after the cowboy artist who’d made it famous, Lewistown was a poor-but-proud agricultural hub. People here trusted guys like Bud, who were more doers than talkers. Had he gone straight from trimming trees to managing his parents’ farm, Bud might have fit right in with the laconic ways and uniform landscapes of his neighbors. But instead, he’d taken one more handyman job, which had turned out to be quite a bit different from the rest. For the final three years of the heady seventies, Bud had served as the technician for a traveling renewable energy road show.

  Living out of a bus with the fourteen other crew members of the New Western Energy Show, Bud Barta had discovered a way of life far removed from his father’s simple credo. The troupe—a political take on the old-time medicine show that deployed theater and do-it-yourself demonstrations to “fight the finite energy conspiracy”—left a lasting impression on the humble tradesman. Between performances, the Energy Show often stayed on organic farms, which impressed Bud as a good model for how he might combine his practical skills with his newfound ecological consciousness. By the time he returned to his family’s place, Bud had come to believe chemicals were immoral. “They are polluting our water and will have long-lasting effects on future generations,” he’d written in the newsletter of the Energy Show’s parent organization, the Alternative Energy Resources Organization. “We don’t have any right to impose our thoughtlessness on them. I don’t want MY kids around chemicals.”

  But Bud made little progress converting his neighbors (whose property completely surrounded his) or his father (who was leasing it to him). The stubbornly individual son of an equally stubborn agribusinessman, Bud faced the quintessential dilemma of the second-generation progressive farmer: His father was just as committed to his own brand of innovation as he was to a low-input alternative. Bud summed it up matter-of-factly. “My dad was the first in the county to farm with chemicals; I was the first to farm without them.”

  Frustrated, Bud recalled a conversation with one of the organic farmers he’d stayed with during his Energy Show days, a jovial guy his age who had faced similar struggles transitioning his family operation. I oughta call D
avid Oien, Bud thought. He wasn’t the first. Another AERO acquaintance was already on the phone with Dave, cooking up a plan to supply hundreds of other farmers with their “miracle” fertilizer crop.

  A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH

  A philosophically minded thirty-six-year-old with a long face and an arresting mop of curly hair, Jim Barngrover spoke with a slow, measured cadence that identified him immediately as a leader. While Bud’s boyish countenance and Dave’s ready smile lent a certain exuberance to the nascent green manure scheme, Jim’s carefully enunciated tone never strayed too far from solemn. When the former teacher lectured about this new way of farming, you had the sense that it was a matter of life and death.

  For Jim this was, in fact, the case. While Dave and Bud had overhauled their farms in anticipation of a crisis, Jim had already lived the very worst of their fears. As a five-year-old kid growing up on a sugar beet farm in Worland, Wyoming, Jim had seen his dad come home sick one day following exposure to the insecticide parathion. Donald Barngrover never got better. Jim watched in horror while his father gradually succumbed to Parkinson’s disease, which forced the Barngrovers to forfeit the family farm. Stoic Donald finally died in 1996, but not before he’d spent forty years wrestling with slow physical and mental degeneration.

  Researchers would later confirm the link between Parkinson’s and parathion, but Jim didn’t wait for the journal articles to come out. Aware that Montana had recently passed a new constitution that promised the right to a “clean and healthful environment,” he moved across the state border in 1975 and got involved in anti-pesticide activism and chemical-free farming.